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is he a porpoise?
Hang on.
Even though with flippers splashing, he is hanging on through sun and green
water and a confused sense of shouting until suddenly the vision snaps out,
and he is back in dark space, feeling Chris' mind-touch tremble against his
own.
"No good."
Chris transmits weakly, like a man gasping. "
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I couldn't break him out. He made me into a goddamn fish. The computer
screen's still there, I could see the words NEGATIVE and HELP CANCEL. He won't
look anymore, he's in heaven."
A dismayed silence, humming with stray half-thoughts. Then Giadoc's
"voice" repeats clearly, "He is our only link."
"If we all try to break him out together I think he'd go crazy,"
Waxman sends. Other minds agree.
"That wouldn't help."
They fall silent again, conscious of the ominous quietude creeping closer and
closer, conscious of the cryptic fortress of energies so near at hand yet so
impregnable. Abruptly Winona's thought explodes in their minds:
"Look! Look, inside that brain or whatever! Don't you see?"
What, where? Dann tries to "look" at the thing, loses it, finally gets a focus
long enough to see that its interior is now in slow, intricate motion, as if
strands of pale, cold light mingled in complex dance. One spot seems brighter
than the rest.
"That's Margaret in there?"
Winona shakes them all.
"It's Margaret!
I'd recognize her anywhere."
Margaret?
Margaret, his lost one, here? All at once Dann's human life comes pouring back
through him as if an inner dam had broken. The bits and pieces he has been
idling with suddenly fall together, making overwhelming order.
The great black shape that swallowed her, the Destroyer, that's where they
are. She fled into this.
Is it possible she's still alive, in whatever mode of life this is, is she
trapped in there?
He focusses with all his might in the crazy indirect way he can "see"
here. That bright spot. Can it be the very flame, the life-spark he had
followed so desperately? Yes! Yes it is she! He is sure.
Without thought he gathers his strength as a man might take a deep breath,
drawingunknowingly on all the lives around him, and hurls a mental cry at the
Destroyer's wall:
"MARGARET! MY DARLING, I'LL HELP YOU!"
He falls back, hit by a sense of stunned disengagement.
"Don't do that again,"
comes Waxman's distant "voice."
But someone else is exlaiming, "Look! Look!"
Dann's attention is all on the cloudy pale fires within. The star that he
knows is Margaret seems to be drawing nearer to him.
"He reached it."
Val's "hand" touches him.
"Let him try again."
"All right."
Waxman's phantom hand comes back too.
"But take it easy this time, Doc."
Trying to modulate himself, Dann grasps at their tenuous touch.
"Margaret! It's Dann here, Doctor Dann. Can you speak to me?"
More silent swirlings, the starlike point brightens. But no sense of thought
or word comes. Instead, as it had done for Ted Yost, an image seems to rise
and glimmer in his mind. He recognizes it incredulously Margaret's computer
screen. Oh God, is this her only mode of communication here? He tries to bring
it in focus, tries also to maintain contact with the others. Do they see it
too?
Pale blue letters come to life on the ghostly screen:
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/ / DOCTOR*DANN*IS*THAT*YOU/ /
"Yes! Yes!"
he projects eagerly.
But the letters have changed, grown huge and ominous. They march across the
screen, repeating meaninglessly:

I MUST FOLLOW I MUST SEARCH I MUST FOLLOW I MUST
SEARCH as though a vast mechanical voice is intervening.
"Margaret!"
At his cry the letters break down to normal size.
//DOCTOR*DANN*YOU*WON'T*HURT*ME*WILL*YOU//
"No, never my dear! Never! Tell me what to do!"
But the silently booming symbols are back, filling the screen. 
I MUST
FOLLOW I MUST SEARCH I MUST FOLLOW
"Margaret! Margaret, tell me how to help you!"

I MUST FOLLOW I MUST SEARCH I MUST
Desperate, Dann pulls on the strengths around him.
"MARGARET!"
Again the normal screen comes back.
//CANT * TURN * OFF * NEED * MORE * STRENGTH// I * WILL *
OPEN * WAY * IN * JUST * YOU// And then her words are swept away by the
maniacal huge intruders:
I MUST FOLLOW I MUST SEARCH
He senses she has spent all her strength. The next move is up to him.
"I'm going to try to get to her. She said she can open it. Waxman, can you
hang onto me somehow?"
"Right."
Dann has no idea what to do, but he hurls himself across the cold chasm right
at the brightness glimmering through the Destroyer's nucleus. The contact with
the wall is horrible, he shrinks and convulses like a soft thing dropped on
fiery ice. But in the midst of his pain he feels it a chink or opening, no
more than a small weak spot in the terrifying surface.
Is he to go in that?
Yes because Margaret is trapped in there, he must reach her. But how? Savingly
the thought comes to him that he is not a mortal man to be frozen or crushed;
he is not more than a pattern of energy seeking to penetrate some resistance.
He must, he will flow in somehow. Hold the thought: he imagines the inflowing
of safe, fearless, mindless electrons. Flow in, go.
But as he knows he has started in, human imagery comes back and he is a man
plunging his frightened arm, his head, into deep fanged jaws that have
swallowed his child. Reach, stretch, get in! And the jaws become a frightful
glacial crevasse squeezing him with icy menace, about to crush out his life.
Still he persists, thrusts himself forward tremblingly, and the image becomes
mixed with another; he is crawling through a perilously frail dark tube, a
frightened astronaut squirming through an umbilicus to the haven of some
capsule. Get on, crawl, squeeze, go.
He feels totally alone. If anyone is holding some rearward part of him he
cannot sense it. Scared to death, he curses at himself for a coward. Damn you,
Dann, Go on.
Just as his last resolve is failing, with astounding reorientation he or a
part of himself is through. His bewildered senses emerge into a swirl of dark
light, of power-filled space in which he can half-see a panorama of stars
against which are unidentifiable things. He checks, remembering that he must [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]